Andrew Owen is a professional writer who started out as a newspaper reporter and currently works in the videogames industry. For the past 16 years he has been designing an 8-bit computer based around the Z80 CPU - but now he's all-in for the MEGA65!

Antti Lukats has a tremendous number of FPGA projects on hackaday.io, and they’re all open source. If you’re looking for street cred with FPGAs, Antti has it. His Hands-on experience with FPGAs and CPLDs stretches back to the very first chips in the 70s.

Dieter Penner is retro freak, MEGA's hardware expert and inventor for many years. He resurrected Tennis for Two and gave us the MEGA65 widget board. Dieter is a professional PCB designer and a great lateral thinker. He prefers a floppy disk over a usb stick at any time.

Paul Gardner-Stephen wrote software for a dual-processor 6502 industrial roll-former at the age of 17, but still likes programming 6502-based systems. Owning a C65 prototype for 15 years, he is the original instigator, VHDL engineer and system architect of the MEGA65.

Ralph Egas is founder and CEO at Abstraction Games. Long time fan of 8-bit machines and GEOS power user back in the day. Software engineer by trade.

You! We need people in development, management and marketing (social media) to get things right and prepare for the big crowdfunding campaign. Become part of a great team of inventors!

Some Stats

8359

Lines of 6502 assembly code

3193

GIT Commits

26876

Lines of VHDL

50

MHz CPU

150

MHz VIC-IV

18

People involved

Timeline

SEP 2016
-
JAN 2017

MAINBOARD

Real physical mainboard

Plans are well advanced for the design of a new MEGA65 motherboard that will have all the necessary ports to connect your real C64/C65 peripherals, such as joysticks, 1541 disk-drives, and selected C64 cartridges.

AUG 2016
-
FEB 2017

GEOS

Specialized GEOS version

Remember GeoPaint, GeoWrite, GeoPublish, and GeoProgrammer? The Commodore 64 had everything the Mac had then, but in 8-bit. Now with MEGA65 you’ll have everything; windows and pointers again but then at a higher resolution built in right to the shell. Expect this special version of GEOS to be compatible with all embedded subsystems like a PS/2 mouse, embedded REU, the F1011 floppy controller and SD card access feeling like a CMD (hard-drive) back in the day with full support for the MEGA65 display modes. 8-bit window toolkits have never been this advanced. Of course, whereas the C64 had a hard time running all of this advanced software, the MEGA65 is totally going to nail it at 48Mhz.

JUL 2016
-
MAR 2017

BRAND LICENSING

Brand licensing if we want to call it a C...

Casaba-melon? No, but while we think that MEGA65 is a pretty cool name, we all agree it would be great if we could license some other name, a bit higher ranked than the Buck Private (3rd Grade), so that the story that was begun in 1989 can be completed, and the last 8-bit computer designed for mass production can finally see light of day.

FEB 2017
-
MAY 2017

SOFTWARE BUNDLE

A machine like this should come with some tasty games!

While we are working on some awesome and precious licensing deals we cannot go into anything specific just yet, but we can already tell you that special MEGA65 versions are in the works of recent and well known Commodore 64 indie games.

MAY 2015
-
JUL 2017

CASE

From prototyping to final molds

There is a saying in the technology industry: “hardware is hard”. It also comes out of rather expensive moulds. We already have designs for the cases, which we still need to refine, and then get them turned into injection moulding tools, so that we can produce beautiful MEGA65 cases.

DEC 2013
-
NOV 2017

VHDL

VHDL defines CPU, GPU, and more

The MEGA65 hardware is written using the VHDL design language. This process is mostly complete, but there are a few outstanding features to finish, and when we get the new motherboards, we will need to tweak the design.

Get MEGA65

MEGA65 is more than a retro computer, it is the 21st century realization of the C65 heritage. It is a complete 8-bit computer running around 50x faster than a C64 while being highly compatible. HD output, SD card support, Ethernet, extended memory and other features increase the fun without spoiling the 8-bit feel. We are giving away the designs for free which take considerable time, effort and money to create.

While it is possible for anyone to download the sources for the FPGA, we are offering a service to keep you updated with the latest core files and infos. We ask for a donation of at least EUR 5 to help us provide this service and contribute to ongoing development. A project like this involves much greater costs than this, so larger donations are appreciated. Talk to us about special recognition for substantial donations.

Use Ophis with the -4 option to target the 4502 CPU. The etherload utility can be used to push compiled programs to the MEGA65 practically instantly to make for a convenient cross-platform development environment.

Upcoming:

MEGA-OS will support interprocess communications, making it possible to write assemblers and compilers that assemble directly into a separate process, and then launches that process when it is ready. Thus it becomes possible to use the MEGA65 as an 8-bit development platform for 8-bit software (or to run a cross-compiler for Linux or Windows if you wish to be really strange).

Contact

You can send us a message via this form. Please note that unless you are press, you want to participate big time or have anything else of significance to tell us, we might not be able to answer. Our available time is being consumed on realising the MEGA65.